In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches were “a general nuisance. Neither their appearance nor their character warrants the respect of the Community.” Mortified, he described the founders of these informal assemblies: “He conducts his Services on such days as he feels disposed mentally and indisposed financially. To this gentleman of the cloth… the church is a legitimate business.” More to the point, he described his perception of the many southern migrants who aspired to found their own churches and religions, recounting how one “young swain” had announced to the leadership of a large traditional black congregation that he had had a dream. “In this dream a still small voice told him to ‘G. P. C.’ and when he heard it he knew that he was instructed to ‘Go Preach Christ.’ After further questioning by the Council, the chairman told him that he had misinterpreted his dream, for it certainly meant ‘Go plant corn’” For many educated African Americans, the idea of southern migrants presuming to enjoy their own religious traditions on their own terms in the urban North was ludicrous.

Ever since C. Eric Lincoln published The Black Muslims in America, in 1961, many observers of the Nation of Islam (NOI) have seemed convinced by his claim that the movement was neither very “religious” nor “Islamic” in nature. In that classic study, currently in its third edition, Lincoln conceded that “the Black Muslim movement constitutes a legitimate religion within the definition of the sociology of religion” but also maintained that “religious values have a secondary importance.” For Lincoln, the success of the movement stemmed not from the particular nature of its religious activities but from its ability to provide a sense of “group solidarity” to the dispossessed black working class. According to Lincoln, this sense of community was produced through the group's embrace of black nationalism, which he understood to be “first a defensive response to external forces—hostile forces that threaten their creative existence.”

In early 1710, a small group of parishioners approached Francis Le Jau, the Anglican missionary to St. James Parish in South Carolina. He recognized them all as regular churchgoers, and he was pleased when they asked him to admit them to Holy Communion. Yet he hesitated, because the men admitted that, having been “born and baptized among the Portuguese,” they were Roman Catholics. Le Jau was always cautious in such cases, he assured church authorities in London. He told the men that he would need them first to renounce “the errors of the Popish Church” before he would allow them the sacrament. He then suggested that they give the matter some thought over the next few months.

The first decades of the twentieth century were years of tremendous upheaval in the American experience of both religion and gender. Industrialization and urbanization transformed nineteenth-century understandings of masculinity and femininity, while massive immigration, debates between modernists and fundamentalists, and the diverse entertainments and opportunities of city life began to challenge the cultural preeminence of American Protestantism. Nowhere was this upheaval felt more acutely—as both an opportunity and a cause for anxiety—than among African Americans. The glowing prospect of better-paying work in the industrial North, as well as the chance to escape the most egregious racism of the Jim Crow South, lured hundreds of thousands of African Americans northward, a great tumultuous river flowing toward what seemed to be freedom.